Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

And The Truth Shall Let You Sleep

By
Richard Steinberg

“Spend all your time waiting For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay.
There’s always one reason
To feel not good enough
And it’s hard at the end of the day.
I need some distraction
Oh beautiful release
Memory seeps from my veins.
Let me be empty
And weightless and maybe
I’ll find some peace tonight,” —Sarah McLachlan

Some peace tonight.

I’d like that.

Some . . .

On any night . . .

But unless I pay Mephistopheles or Archangel Michael (I’m never exactly sure which) their required tithes, I’ll have none. I’ll lay there in bed, my mind moving from vision to topic to recollection to fantasy with a blindingly random celerity that never slows; simply accelerates on and on and on until synapses warp, distort, and collapse from the weight and the friction and the heat and the hurt.

And I may lose consciousness . . . but never win sleep.

I’ve tried drugs (prescribed or otherwise obtained) tried exhausting my body with exercise, hammering it with alcohol, blinding my mind with meaningless sex or privileged lovemaking. I’ve counted sheep, royalties, tried warm milk, read extensively, consulted doctors, received counseling from professionals, amateurs, and most everyone who’s had a sleepless night or two.
But as the “cure” of the week fails, again, and the sun rises while the body breaks down just a little more and I face another day without replenishment I can hear Mephisto and Mike laughing at me while they share my last bottle of beer.

“Pay us,” they chortle, “and we’ll let you sleep.”

And the payment they demand – their vig on my sleep – is that I sit in front of the computer and confront those parts of myself I most fear, most despise, most deny, most loathe. They require me to rip open my soul as you would gut a fish; but instead of dumping the entrails into a handy garbage can, mine must be artfully arranged on a page.

Not just write, but write about truth.

There are nights when I put out fifteen or twenty high quality, entertaining, and necessary pages for the project at hand. But they are also emotionally void – technically superior but without meaning or emotion – and when I go to bed my mind ignites in a spherical explosion and sleep is denied.

Now I’m not arguing that there needs to be an emotional insight, discovery, revelation, or even minor angst on every page you write. There doesn’t have to be blood on every page for the Sanguinary Gods (or are they demons) of Writing to be sated.

But there does have to be blood at least beneath the skin of the project, whether it shows often or little, for them to be well pleased.

Now before you beginning muttering among yourselves – “Steinberg is reinventing hyperbole to make his point” – fellow contributors Janet Berliner and Stan Ridgley have known me for years and can back up my insomniac’s litany from their personal experiences. They’ve known me to be miserable, contentious, obnoxious, and depressive (combining rage with depression is a unique byproduct of my sleep deprivation) while I’ve been putting out vast quantities of good, solid, emotionally neutered product. They’ve also known me to be content, comfortable, and relaxed when I’ve only written a page or two of truth and substance.

So am I arguing that unless you wholly emotionally commit to the work with the fierceness of a zealot – or a Steinberg – you will be cursed by the Gods (instead of being granted peace and sleep) and will have your brain burn with the same intensity that the great bird picked (perhaps still picks) at Prometheus’s liver?

If you don’t put at least as much blood into the circulatory system of your story and characters as you do on your victim’s faces or pooling on the ground around them are you doomed to failure and moribund essay writing?

I wish that were true, but it’s not. A great deal of flat, uninspired, not living fiction is published or produced each year, and a great many of those achieve success . . . sometimes unbelievable success.

That’s one of the unfortunate truths in the dark and gooey heart of writing.

But this I promise you: nothing you write will affect or effect anything ever. Your work may be enjoyed, well reviewed, commercially successful – things to be desired and experienced absolutely – but in the end, the world your words passed over will show no signs they were ever there. It will be as if you and your work had never been.

Is it then your responsibility to be remembered, to change the world (or attempt to change it) to state for the record and for eternity what you believe and why?

Again, no. Success as a writer (by some horrible definitions) can be had without risk of actually having to say something.

But if that’s what you want, why did God (or evolution or whatever it is that you believe began somewhere and left man at a given demarcation along the way) give you a voice?
A voice by which you can challenge the heavens to strike you down, challenge your fellow humans to pull their heads out of their collective orifices; a voice that can praise or condemn or instruct or cajole.

A voice, if left unused, that can only condemn . . . whatever it is that you call “soul.”
One definition of sin (from within my own belief system) is: the failure to properly use a gift from God.

Now maybe you don’t believe in sin, or God, or even in gifts. That’s a discussion for a different time and forum. But I’ve never heard of a writer who didn’t believe in failure. Or who hadn’t experienced failure. Or who hadn’t been changed by failure.

Who hasn’t learned that failure is a thing to be avoided.

But how will you avoid it? Will you take no chances, play it safe and down the middle? Will you (in a nonplageristic sense) pass someone else’s story through a generic filter and your own fingers retyping without reimagining? Will your finished work represent nothing but airy haze which could disappear in a nano-second and never be missed?

Or will your readers sense a storm or a sunrise breaking just beyond that haze?
I am damaged; been broken apart and glued back together so many times that the barely seen, tightly glued joinings of the shards of my being wait impatiently for the right breeze from the right angle to completely fly me apart.

This next time, perhaps, irreparably.

I think that all writers – to one extent or another – are damaged individuals. Maybe, in the end, that’s what separates the writer from the creative typist. Simply the ability to feel the damage, throw wide open the overcoat, point to it, laugh or rage, and then examine it.

In front of God and everybody.

And when we succeed, oh . . .

Bram Stoker was a man unable, no matter how hard he tried, to control his “baser nature.” He drank himself into near oblivion nightly just to “keep the beast caged.” And had success as a novelist: Under the Sunset was his first successful novel, and The Snake’s Pass his second. Both almost completely forgotten, even in their time.

Then Stoker (at the urging of his friend and employer, the English actor Henry Irving) not only confronted his nature, but in so doing decided he had a right to that nature and owed no one an apology for it.

And he expressed that truth in Dracula . . . which will never be forgotten . . . and is a novel with blood not only flowing through the veins and arteries of the work, but through its spirit as well.
Curt Siodmak was a decent writer whose works such as People on Sunday and Platform 1 Does Not Answer were always well received, always made money. Siodmak told the story abut going into a publisher’s office the year after his second bestseller (Platform 1) had been published and having the man say to him: “Have you ever published anything?”

For years, Siodmak had concentrated on being the most commercial writer he could be, and it never felt right. And then, he decided he could no longer be silent about the coming cataclysm he saw brewing in the heart of Central Europe; and that regardless of its commerciality he must (“to sleep at night,” maybe that’s why I feel such a kinship to him) write about it.

And he expressed that truth in The Wolf Man . . . which will never be forgotten . . . a novel of personal pain and torment, flowing with the blood of a man who barely escaped the unreasoning persecution that took twenty-one of his family members.

Dracula and The Wolf Man, two classic novels of horror and dark visions filled with the fears, pains, mortal dreads, and deepest obsessions of their writers. Two novels that will be remembered forever. Two visions of two very different men who shined a light on that dark and gooey spot deep within themselves, snapped a picture . . . then had the guts to share it with us.
Mephistopheles, Archangel Michael demand it of me or they will not let me sleep.

This is an easier and more palatable explanation then my taking responsibility for punishing myself when I look away from truth in favor of the always comely “easy.”

Examining our own truths is not easy, seldom pleasant, occasionally pretty, mostly frightening. Translating that truth from deep within us to the page is a process that combines technique, a certain talent, and very real psychic bravery.

And each of us must find that thing which cues truth expression, hopefully in a less deleterious manner than mine own, and then must work to put that self-revelation in our writing. As overt as a storyline, or as covert as a character’s momentary but intense shiver on seeing an ice cream cone on the ground.

I am a damaged person, a writer seeking to heal himself and hopefully – at the same time – some small dark and gooey corner of the world.

I want to sleep; not in physical collapse or narcofied relief, but because I pulled it off! Because I put some blood beneath the page, regardless of whether or not there is any on top of it. Because I reached inside and pulled out some truth (however subjective that truth might be) and shared it with a dark and frightening world longing for truth . . . any real truth.

I want to sleep; because after sharing that truth, I am less damaged and the arms of the Angel wrap themselves around me and rock me to a blessed slumber.

“In the arms of an angel, Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You’re in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there,” —-Sarah McLachlan

I hope to see you there.

Believe!

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